


I'm making you uneasy aren't I?

by fivefeetapart



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Happy Ending, PTSD, Panic Attack, Post Prison, amy calms jake down, kashoot me i dont deal well with tagging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:49:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21989788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivefeetapart/pseuds/fivefeetapart
Summary: Amy wakes up from a sound. It takes a while, too long, for her sleepy mind to register what it is. The sound is coming from beside her, and it’s the sound of someone crying. She reaches out to touch Jake and her hand finds his shoulder. He’s shaking. Before she’s fully understood what this means Jake has moved away, so that she’s no longer touching him.Something’s wrong.-Or; Amy thinks back to Jake's first panic attack after he came back from prison.
Relationships: Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago
Comments: 5
Kudos: 88





	I'm making you uneasy aren't I?

**Author's Note:**

> Hi hi, I think I deal with my own anxiety by writing about it,,, this was based on a combination of panic attacks I've had plus some basic research I did on PTSD.
> 
> Title from 6/10 by Dodie 
> 
> So because Jake is a softie for Taylor Swift music and so is my best friend I asked her for some song recs to fit the fic and I'm putting them here so you can listen to them while reading if you want, I listened to them while writing so idk maybe that's fun??.
> 
> Clean - TS  
> Sad Beautiful Tragic - TS  
> The archer – TS
> 
> Take care of yourselves, if you at any point feel triggered or uncomfortable while reading, stop reading!  
> Stay hydrated!

Amy can hear Jake singing along to Taylor Swift in the other room.

Ever since he’s been back from prison he’s always listening to music or some podcast, in general he’s just been making noise constantly. Noise means people, movement, safety. And Taylor Swift in particular, for Jake, means being home and safe. 

Amy twists the engagement ring on her left hand. 

The first few weeks after Jake got back from prison he seemed rather okay given the situation. He was eager to get back to his old life, to being the old Jake. Too eager, maybe, in hindsight. He and Amy went out a few times, but they mostly spent their nights at home. Settling back into their old, known routines before they had even noticed it.

But then, after the first few weeks, when Amy thought Jake was really getting into the routine of his life again, the day after they got engaged, he had his first flashback driven panic attack. And for the next month he was a mess. To put it softly. He’d wake up screaming multiple times a night, if he could even fall asleep at all. He couldn’t be in a room with the door closed without getting a panic attack. He’d fall into breakdowns with seemingly no reason. He was always looking over his shoulder like there might be someone sneaking up on him. Even the smallest noise startled him like he was a dog on new year’s eve. And he wouldn’t let Amy leave his side. 

Amy didn’t mind, really, she didn’t want to leave Jake’s side, but it hurt so badly to see him like that. To know that she was doing all she could to not have Jake be hurting, and then at the end of the day he was still hurting. She felt a familiar tightness around her chest for that entire month. Familiar from all the anxiety she’d had to deal with in her life. She couldn’t let herself fall apart while Jake was doing it. He needed her. So she carried on and on and on. Until she felt like she was going to explode from panic, and sadness, and hurt, and anger. Anger at the world that it would break Jake like this. She felt like she was drowning for a whole month. She couldn’t breathe for an entire month. 

But Amy could breathe again now, she’s here and Jake’s in the other room singing and they’re both okay. They’re both breathing and they’re both living. But every time she loses sight of him, even for a few minutes, she has to suppress the urge to pat him down from top to toe to make sure he’s still whole. She did that the day she picked him up from the prison. And he was still whole. And he is now. 

He isn’t the same old Jake anymore, though. No matter how badly he tries and wants to be. Prison left its invisible dents. 

The sound of that same man, Jake Peralta, her husband-to-be, singing along to his favourite singer from the top of his lungs, calms her. It reminds her how much she loves him, and how much she is willing to give up to stay with him. To never let him leave, ever, again. To never let the world take him from her again. Hearing him sing carefree now is such a contrast to him not even a month ago screaming, because he couldn’t get his brain to stop playing back all the worst moments over and over and over.

And suddenly it’s like she’s reliving the moment it started. A Wednesday morning. 5am. 

-

Amy wakes up from a sound. It takes a while, too long, for her sleepy mind to register what it is. The sound is coming from beside her, and it’s the sound of someone crying. She reaches out to touch Jake and her hand finds his shoulder. He’s shaking. Before she’s fully understood what this means Jake has moved away, so that she’s no longer touching him.

Something’s wrong.

Amy sits up, switches her bedside lamp on and reaches for her glasses. She puts them on and their bedroom comes into picture. Sharp and clear she can see the walls they painted together and Jake’s dirty clothes lying on the floor. She can see Jake now, too. 

He’s rolled up in foetal position. All the muscles in his face seem tight and his whole body shaking. The sound that is coming out of him is more than just heart-breaking, it reaches into her chest, grabs hold of everything inside her and crushes it all into tiny piece. Jake is in pain and Amy doesn’t know what to do.  
She touches his shoulder again to let him know she’s there and she’s not going anywhere. But he moves away, again. A thousand thoughts hit her at once, but one screams loudly above all of them. 

Jake is in pain. 

It had seemed unreal when he got back from prison and she’d patted him down and she’d hugged him and he was whole and he was okay. It’d seemed unreal how good he was. But it was good and Amy was happy she had him again. In the back of her head she had kept wondering if he wasn’t pushing his feelings away, but having Jake back was more important than worrying whether he might actually not fully be back yet.

But now, Jake is in pain.

Something inside of him must have been broken all along. And then the crying and the shaking click in Amy’s brain. He’s having a panic attack. She knows panic attacks. She knows how to deal with them, she herself has had more than her fair share over time. She can do this. 

Softly she places her hand on Jake’s shoulder for the third time. 

“I’m here, Jake, whatever it is, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to get through this together.” 

Moving away from her touch, again, he comes alarmingly close to the edge of their bed. 

“Jake, please do not fall out of our bed because you’re having a panic attack”

Amy is closer to crying, but somehow her joke, not at all a joke really, comes out as a nearly breathless laugh.

And then Jake actually does fall out of bed.

From the sheer shock and ridiculousness, and the early hour probably, Amy starts to laugh. She can’t stop herself and she feels horrible about it. Jake is in pain and she’s laughing, she must be one of those awful sadist who laugh at their loved ones’ pain. But then Jake cries out and she’s close to crying again.

Amy crawls over to the side of their bed to help him. He’s still in foetal position, but his eyes are open now, staring ahead, a little glazed over, like he’s staring into the distance on the beach, but there is no distance, he’s staring at a wall. Amy climbs off their bed and sits at Jake’s feet. She doesn’t want to touch him again, scared she’ll somehow make his panic attack worse. She doesn’t know what to do.

“Jake, will you please tell me what you need from me, I don’t know how to help you and I hate seeing you like this.”

She hopes it’ll get through to him. 

He sits up against the wall, arms still around his legs, still shaking. Maybe she did get through to him at least a little bit. Then he lifts his head and he looks her in the eyes. There’s not a lot of light in the room, but there’s more than enough to see the pain and panic on his face. Seeing his face like that hurts more than she ever thought was possible. 

She breathes in through her mouth and it’s as if her chest explodes. She breathes out through her mouth and her chest implodes. She goes on exploding with every breath in and imploding with every breath out, accompanied by Jake’s fast and short breathing until she feels like there is nothing left of her. Like her whole being has faded away. 

But then she feels something on her knee.

Jake has pushed his foot not even two inches forward, but he’s touching her, he’s reached out, asked for help through his foot. And the supernovas in Amy’s lungs slowly come to a stop. She looks up at Jake and holds her head a little bit sideways to ask what he wants. 

Jake blinks.

And again.

And then a tear rolls down from his eye.

Amy watches it roll halfway down his cheek and then she slowly reaches out to wipe it from his face. And he lets her. 

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” She asks him just to be sure.

He doesn’t answer. Maybe he shakes his head just the tiniest bit, but that could just be her imagination. 

So she scoots towards him a tiny bit, keeping her eyes on his face to make sure it’s okay. Her knees touch his feet and he doesn’t move away. She very slowly puts her hands on his knees and he lets her. His breathing might not have slowed yet, and he might still be shaking, and he’s still clearly panicked, but he’s letting her touch him again, and that feels as such a victory right now, that she wants to do a tiny victory dance. She doesn’t though, she gives him a small smile instead.  
And then an idea pops into her head, or more specifically, a story. 

“Remember when, in my first year at the nine-nine, I had been constantly dealing with this hyperactive cop sitting across from me, and you’d come up with something new, like, every day, and this time it was naming the mouse that was living inside your desk. You held a competition to decide what his name was going to be, but only Charles participated, and he wanted to name the mouse Jake the second, which, of course, is a horrible name for a mouse. So you picked the mouse from your drawer and held him close to your face and asked him, what is your name, little mouse. Obviously the mouse didn’t answer, so you walked around to my desk and you held him close to my face, hello Amy, what do you think my name should be, you said in the worst mouse voice ever. Remember that?”

Amy doesn’t know why her brain has spit out this specific story, but it seems to be serving its purpose, because underneath her hands she can feel Jake’s knees have stopped shaking. And his breath is finally calming down a little bit, too.

“So you held the mouse up close to my face, and without turning towards it, I was scared as shit of mice, I said.”

Jake’s breathing has slowed to a little bit faster than regular. Suddenly she hears his voice, raspy and nearly breaking.

“Algernon, you named him Algernon.”

A grin breaks through the tears she hadn’t even noticed streaming down her face.

“Yes, yes I did.”

And just like that Jake’s panic attack is over.

-

Amy inhales. No supernova. She gets up and walks to Jake in the other room. She flings her arms around his shoulders from behind him and kisses him on his cheek.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too, Ames.”

Jake twists around in her arms and puts his own hands on her hips. 

“Dance with me.”

She laughs loud, throwing her head back. He starts swaying his hips.

“Come on, Amy, dance with me!”

She slowly sways her hips along with his. And before she knows it she going all out, and he is, too. They’re both singing along and it’s good. 

Jake is just so good. And he’s okay again, sure he’s a little more chipped than before, but he found himself again. And they’re okay, they’re good.

**Author's Note:**

> Go listen to 'Paper Rings' by Taylor Swift and have a little dance party.
> 
> Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, if you did please let me know by leaving kudos and/or a comment telling me your favourite parts or just incoherent screaming (my personal go-to comment). 
> 
> Shout-out to my best friend, I love you loser and I'm really happy you listen to my bullshit and recommend me songs.


End file.
